Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

It's all minor stuff that should have been addressed during the assessment and testing of the vehicle pre-production. The only somewhat significant issue is that the front end can bottom out going through dips on country roads at speed. This was unsettling the first couple of times.

Other than that, a manual passenger seat, small sun visors that don't extend, windscreen washers that belong on a Barina, and more road noise than I expected are all irritating.

The Good:

The drivetrain! The 3.6-litre engine (with a very sweet growl) and nine-speed auto make a great combination, and together with the AWD it's a brilliant cruiser.

A friend, who has a new Golf, drove it and couldn't believe how seamless the gear changes are. He compared it to a CVT – in a good way. We get good economy at 9.0L/100km with a daily mix of country highway and peak-hour city traffic. We manage to do around 6000km/month split between the Tourer and our 2017 Koleos. We do not drive gently, and both have the speeding tickets to prove it unfortunately.

The build quality is really impressive with tight panel gaps and a solid feel to everything. It's a long car, and that translates into very good cabin room thankfully, and comfortable seats – particularly on long journeys (that's every weekday for us).

I closely followed the reviews of the new Insignia from launch and that initially sparked my interest in the ZB. The more press it got, the more interested I became. We live in the Victorian highlands, so I wanted an AWD to replace our Sorento. Thanks to the Holden dealer, I had the opportunity to drive a pre-production car in January. Once I saw it, felt it, heard that glorious engine note and then drove it, I was sold.

Three months later, we were the proud owners of a Tourer with a seven-year warranty (thanks to an early promotion)! It's big, comfortable, safe and powerful. It is also fantastic value, by any measure. Are we happy with our purchase? Absolutely. If you're in the market, do yourself a favour and take one for a spin.

NOTE: With no photo supplied, we have used a CarAdvice photo for this story. The model shown is a Calais-V, but largely identical at this angle.

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